Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 30
reductionistically rather than constructively.
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The result is a loss not only of the world, but also of other
selves and of God. What is left is an uncritical and uncriticizable ethnocentrism on the level of public
discourse erected on the shaky foundations of a narcissistic, privatized, and solipsistic individualism.
This would be the return of modernity with a vengeance, an ultra-modernism which finally marks
Rorty`s neo-pragmatist enterprise.
For this reason, I am unsure if a pragmatist theology would be either modernistic or
postmodernistic, and have attempted to communicate my hesitation with the slashed reference to
post/modern throughout this paper. A post-Rortyean neo-pragmatist theology would be post-modernistic
insofar as it correctly identifies the fallibilistic, nonfoundationalistic, socio-historical traditioned-ness,
and narrative texture of all human interpretations of the divine. At the same time, however, it would also
be modernistic in certain irreducible senses delineated above, being a remnant of modernity`s dualisms
which remain to infect neo-pragmatism`s projects.
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Alongside the Rortyean trajectory of pragmatism,
however, is the Peircean pragmaticist alternative. This would give us all the benefits of a neo-pragmatic
theology without its liabilities. Further, it is not modernistic in eschewing modernity`s treacherous
dualisms, nor is it pre-modern in its having awakened the second naïvete against traditionalist
authoritarianism. Perhaps it points the way forward toward a truly post-modern position, one that avoids
modernity`s (and the Philosophical tradition`s) pitfalls rather than mishandling it. And if that is the case,
then might not this exercise serve as seed thought for reconceiving a post-Rortyean, pragmati(ci)st and
truly postmodern theological account of Christian belief and practice in our times?
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78
On Rorty`s own modernism, against all his protestations, see Greenway, Richard Rorty's Revised
Pragmatism, ch. 8; Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism, ch. 4; and Charles B. Guignon, Pragmatism
or Hermeneutics? Epistemology after Foundationalism, in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard
Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1991), 81-101.
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Thus it may be better to follow Richard Bernstein who defends Rorty`s neo-pragmatism by charactarizing
it as a practical-moral vision (with political implications) in the tradition of the Socratic virtues. For Rorty, the
moral task of the philosopher or the cultural critic is to defend the openness of human conversation against all those
temptations and real threats that seek closure; see Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,
Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 205.
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My thanks to David Williams (Colorado Christian University) who invited me to present on the topic of
pragmatism and postmodern theology at this 54
th
Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. I am